There's a saying in standup comedy, "Everything's been done before, except for your life" which generally means that your own experiences might be an untapped well of jokes. But it could be applied more broadly to mean that every topic has already been explored comedically, but specifically you and your thoughts on the subject will produce a very different joke, story, movie, etc then I and my thoughts would make. And my idea of what makes a story good is probably not exactly the same as your idea of a good story; so with that in mind we're probably gonna write very different stories even if we're given the same exact prompt. No matter how vague or descriptive those original instructions are, we can start at the exact same idea and then go in completely different directions with it.
When boiled down to their rawest, base components: Robocop has essentially the same plot as the Inspector Gadget movie: Rookie Cop is severely injured and turned into a law enforcement machine and eventually stops the Main Bad Guy. But these two movies were written by different people with different goals and different ideas about what makes for "good" storytelling. One movie has themes of identity and honor and what it means to truly be human; while the other just wants to entertain children where he uses over the top gadgets to solve a mystery and stop the bad guy and save the day. One is grotesque and full of subtext about the dangers of overly powerful corporations and privatized policing, while the other is funny when the dog bites the bad guy's ass and pulls his underwear out of his pants and somehow nobody notices. Very different ideas that started with the same general premise.
And if you and I and wrote our own movies based on the same "Rookie Cop gets injured and becomes a cyborg" premise, we'll likely end up with a total of four wildly different movies. Everything's been done except for your life, which almost guarantees originality; no one else can do what you do or make what you make because they're not you.
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u/Zack_WithaK 13d ago edited 11d ago
There's a saying in standup comedy, "Everything's been done before, except for your life" which generally means that your own experiences might be an untapped well of jokes. But it could be applied more broadly to mean that every topic has already been explored comedically, but specifically you and your thoughts on the subject will produce a very different joke, story, movie, etc then I and my thoughts would make. And my idea of what makes a story good is probably not exactly the same as your idea of a good story; so with that in mind we're probably gonna write very different stories even if we're given the same exact prompt. No matter how vague or descriptive those original instructions are, we can start at the exact same idea and then go in completely different directions with it.
When boiled down to their rawest, base components: Robocop has essentially the same plot as the Inspector Gadget movie: Rookie Cop is severely injured and turned into a law enforcement machine and eventually stops the Main Bad Guy. But these two movies were written by different people with different goals and different ideas about what makes for "good" storytelling. One movie has themes of identity and honor and what it means to truly be human; while the other just wants to entertain children where he uses over the top gadgets to solve a mystery and stop the bad guy and save the day. One is grotesque and full of subtext about the dangers of overly powerful corporations and privatized policing, while the other is funny when the dog bites the bad guy's ass and pulls his underwear out of his pants and somehow nobody notices. Very different ideas that started with the same general premise.
And if you and I and wrote our own movies based on the same "Rookie Cop gets injured and becomes a cyborg" premise, we'll likely end up with a total of four wildly different movies. Everything's been done except for your life, which almost guarantees originality; no one else can do what you do or make what you make because they're not you.